“John Cage’s first and only performance of How to Get Started on 31 Aug 1989 was conceived of almost as an afterthought–a performance substituting for another that had been previously planned. In his performance, delivered at a sound design conference in Nicasio, California, Cage talks about the difficulty of initiating the creative process, and about improvisation, a subject about which he had long been deeply ambivalent. He proposes a collaborative framework in which sound engineers capture and subsequently layer his extemporized monologue, which consisted of ten brief commentaries on topics then of interest. This amounted to an experiment having to do with thinking in public before a live audience.”

The publication also features commentaries by Laura Kuhn, Aaron Levy and Arthur J. Sabatini.

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